Kanye West has been out of ideas for a long time now. This didn’t use to be a problem. On 2016’s The Life of Pablo and Donda, from 2021, there were, if anything, too many of them; unfinished and too-finished iterations of different impulses clouded rather than deepened one another. (Even 2018’s ye, a creative nadir, came during his sprint of 7-song albums produced in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which yielded some excellent music from other vocalists.) This was the maximalism that began with Late Registration in 2005 and reached its apex eight years later, on Yeezus, where radically disparate parts were synthesized into a domesticity fever dream that is completely singular.
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